Race dialogue, education need to continue

Chris Green

Monday

Mar 1, 2010 at 12:01 AMMar 1, 2010 at 12:05 AM

ROCKFORD — Look out the double-paned, lightly tinted window in your living room, and you’ll see a neatly framed but narrow view of your immediate surroundings. Open the window and look through just the screen, and you’ll see a framed picture that is less distorted, but shades darker than reality.

ROCKFORD — Look out the double-paned, lightly tinted window in your living room, and you’ll see a neatly framed but narrow view of your immediate surroundings. Open the window and look through just the screen, and you’ll see a framed picture that is less distorted, but shades darker than reality.

Only when you remove the glass and screen and let the sunlight in do you see a clear picture of what is before you.

Talk to the Rev. Bob Hillenbrand of First Presbyterian Church about the subject of race, he might call our propensity to prejudge and stereotype a filter that diminishes a true picture of each individual.

“We all see things through our upbringing and filters,” he said. “Sometimes that clashes with what reality actually is. We need to be able to pull down the screens and actually see each other. It will expose some fundamental flaws of how reality has been presented to us.”

On Oct. 31, about 300 people attempted to remove their filters or ingrained stereotypes and talked with one another at the YWCA’s National Conversation on Race. They did so with the help of Lee Mun Wah, a nationally renowned diversity trainer from Berkeley, Calif., who facilitated the event.

We revisited with Hillenbrand, his wife, Pamela, and Michelle Griggs of Rockford College, who all participated in the event. While Black History Month has come to a close, The Hillenbrands and Griggs said the conversation on race must continue.

Just a beginning
“Even before the October program at Rockford College, I encouraged people to be thinking about racism and prejudices,” Bob Hillenbrand said. “I talked about it from the pulpit. My wife and I talk very openly about racism.”

While the Hillenbrands have no problem broaching the subject, that’s not necessarily the case for most. Before delving in, perhaps a good starting point is knowing what racism is and being able to recognize it.

“Just about everybody has a prejudice,” Bob Hillenbrand said, “but racism is prejudice plus power. The power comes in large groups or majority groups.”

At the Oct. 31 session with Lee Mun Wah, Hillenbrand said an atmosphere was created where he felt “encouraged and able to open my ears and mind, and African-Americans and Latinos felt encouraged to say their experiences.”

Pamela Hillenbrand, pastor of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, said she took away a continuing need for education and dialogue.

“To me, it was just a beginning of what we needed to be about. I’m glad to see Lee Mun Wah is coming back to the Y for training. I see people beginning to step up and create dialogue in the community” such as last Thursday night’s panel discussion hosted by Rockford Urban Ministries titled: “Racism and the Schools.”

After the October conference, the Hillenbrands shared what they learned with their respective congregations.

“We team preached at his church and at mine,” she said. “We really spoke about the fact that racism is a serious issue. Not only here in Rockford but all over. We have to learn about the dynamics of it that it is institutional and systemic. It’s not enough to want racism not to exist, but we have to actively oppose it.

The same goal
Michelle Griggs, director of the Kobe-Regents Center for Global Education at Rockford College, helped organize and host Lee Mun Wah at the college. She called Mun Wah her “hero” and the event “one of the best experiences I had last year.”

“The room itself was very teachable,” she said. “People were willing to speak up and speak out. The topic was kind of heavy, but people were willing to get out there and say, ‘let’s make a difference.’ ”

Griggs recalled people sharing daily experiences of working alongside another person, but knowing very little about that person and vice versa. “Do you really talk to the people around you?”

Griggs said she has taken her hero’s diversity message into the high schools, delivering a portion of “What Stands Between Us,” a conversation piece from Lee Mun Wah’s StirFry Seminars that explores such topics as “What People of Color Can’t Say and Whites Won’t Ask.”

“It was very well received,” Griggs said. “We’re trying to follow up with that again this year.”

Griggs, who also serves as a diversity facilitator with the Y’s Unlearning Racism, said Rockford College hopes to partner again with the YWCA and host another “unlearned racism event” in October.

“We definitely are not dropping the ball on this,” she said.

“We’re all striving for the same goal: personal peace and acceptance of one another. We do exist, and we have to share this planet. So how do we do that?”